t there must be in the grave. The thought
came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full
appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and
entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from
before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out
utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared
swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then
silence, and stillness, night were the universe.

I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was
lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even
to describe; yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber--no! In
delirium--no! In a swoon--no! In death--no! even in the grave all is
not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most
profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a
second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not
that we have dreamed. In the return to life from the swoon there are two
stages; first, that of the sense of mental or spiritual; secondly, that
of the sense of physical, existence. It seems probable that if, upon
reaching the second stage, we could recall the impressions of the
first, we should find these impressions eloquent in memories of the gulf
beyond. And that gulf is--what? How at least shall we distinguish its
shadows from those of the tomb? But if the impressions of what I have
termed the first stage, are not, at will, recalled, yet, after long
interval, do they not come unbidden, while we marvel whence they come?
He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly
familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating
in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who
ponders over the perfume of some novel flower--is not he whose brain
grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has
never before arrested his attention.

Amid frequent and thoughtful endeavors to remember; amid earnest
struggles to regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness
into which my soul had lapsed, there have been moments when I have
dreamed of success; there have been brief, very brief periods when I
have conjured up remembrances which the lucid reason of a later epoch
assures me could have had reference only to that condition of seeming
unconsciousness. These shadows o